Literature and the Gods

VI. Mallarmé in Oxford

Mallarmé in Oxford

O n March 1st, 1894, in Oxford, and before an audience of about sixty people, dotted here and there with a few professors but mainly made up, as he himself would put it, of ladies “looking for a chance to hear spoken French,” Mallarmé gave the lecture generally known as “La Musique et les Lettres.” Having been invited to give “some information on various aspects of the current state of literature,” he took this journalistic task quite literally and began with an announcement that sounded like a newspaper headline:

“In fact I bring news. The most surprising news. Nothing like this has ever happened. On a touché au vers. Verse is under attack.”

There is a wonderful irony in that on, for as with the report of some terrorist attack, an uncertainty over the perpetrator increases our sense of terror. And then that touché—such a physical verb! And one that presupposes, for verse, a previous state of untouchability. Whereas now apparently it is entering a phase of promiscuity. Mallarmé then proceeds with his parody of a front page, but this time taking the leader column as his model: “Governments change; prosody remains ever intact: whether because during revolutions it passes unobserved, or because the attack doesn’t imply that this ultimate dogma may change.” Then he apologized for his jerky and breathless delivery, like someone who has seen an accident and is desperate to talk about it, with a distress proportional to the gravity of the event: “for verse is everything, to those who write.” Mallarmé doesn’t say “to those who are poets”; he says “to those who write.” Premise: prose itself is “a broken verse, which plays with its timbres and its concealed rhymes too.” The statement is followed by a few technicalities, then a final flicker: “for every soul is a rhythmical knot.”

Let’s take a closer look at the sequence of gestures in this piece of pure mental theatre, something that after all is Mallarmé’s chosen discipline. Invited to speak on the subject of “French poetry” as if at an evening school, and preceded — for those few in the know — by a reputation for being one of the least accessible of poets, Mallarmé begins with an announcement that might be written in block capitals on the front page of an evening paper. A few lines later he declares, or implies, one of his most radical ideas: that prose doesn’t exist, that everything is verse, whether easily recognizable as such or not; then he winds up with one of those radiant formulations to which he alone knew the secret: the soul is a “rhythmical knot.” Those who cannot, in the succession of these three scenes, grasp Mallarmé’s “flower”—and I use the word in the sense it had for Zeami, founder of Noh theatre — are not likely to grasp it in one of his sonnets.

But let’s try to reconstruct the events Mallarmé was eager to bring news of. Behind it all is the death, in 1885, of Victor Hugo. It marked an abrupt turning point in the secret history of literature. Mallarmé spoke of it thus in Crise de vers:

In performing his mysterious task, Hugo channeled all prose, philosophy, eloquence, and history into verse, and since he personally was that verse, he more or less confiscated the right of those who think, discuss, or narrate to make themselves heard. Monument in this desert, with silence far away; in a crypt the divinity of a majestic, unconscious idea: that the form called verse is simply itself literature; that verse occurs as soon as diction is marked, rhythm as soon as we have style. Verse, I believe, waited respectfully for the giant who had caused it to be identified with his iron hand and ever firmer blacksmith’s grip to die before breaking up. All language articulated with metrics, whence it draws its vital rhythms, escapes in a free disjunction of thousands of simple elements.

If literary history were capable of saying what it is that happens in literature, this is how it would speak. In a few lines Mallarmé has told the story of that movement, first centripetal, then centrifugal, which governs the French language, before him, and then after him down to the present day. Centripetal: Hugo appropriates all the forms in his smoky forge. In so doing he leads us to understand that verse incorporates all of literature in itself. Centrifugal: when Hugo dies, literature seizes the opportunity to escape from the magic circle of meter, no longer guarded by the powerful Cyclops, and to disperse “in a free disjunction of thousands of simple elements.” First symptom of this new phase: some young poets begin to champion, often with naïve arrogance, the practice of vers libre. Mallarmé knows better than anyone else that vers libre is no great discovery. On the contrary, he knows that to speak of liberty in literature is out of place — and so suggests (ingeniously) that this new verse be called “polymorphous” instead. But he doesn’t discourage the young poets; for he sees in them the first agents of a healthy shake-up following the “fragmentation of the great literary rhythms.” All at once the poetic meters, and even their “definitive jewel,” the alexandrine, are no more than noble flotsam and jetsam bobbing about in the mix like some “old and worn-out cast,” while already Laforgue is inviting his readers to submit to “the sure enchantment of false verse.” Now a “deft dissonance” becomes an attraction for the delicate sensibility, where once it would have been condemned out of hand in a rage of pedantry. And something similar was going on in music too: an exacerbated chromaticism was tormenting tonality, emptying it from within, until eventually the Viennese would reject it altogether.

But these developments were also to be seen in the light of another piece of traumatic news that once again Mallarmé felt it important to report. This time, and with the most studied carelessness, the occasion he chose for his announcement was a survey carried out on behalf of the Echo de Paris by the providential journalist Jules Huret, to whom Mallarmé spoke thus:

Verse occurs whenever there is rhythm in language, which is to say everywhere but on posters and the advertising page of the newspapers. There are verses in the genre called prose, sometimes wonderful verses and in every rhythm. But to tell the truth, prose doesn’t exist: there is the alphabet and then there is verse, which may be more or less tight, more or less diffuse. Every time there is a strain toward style, there is versification.

Thus does Mallarmé turn all the terms in the argument on their heads with a boldness incomparably greater than that of the proponents of free verse. In just a couple of sentences verse is made to take on a physiognomy that would hitherto have been unthinkable: we no longer have canonical verse with its established metrics, nor even the amorphous free verse, but an all-pervasive, ubiquitous being which turns out to be the hidden nerve structure of every composition made of words. If the integrity of a respectful and canonical versification is forever wounded by this attack, and if it now seems that prose “doesn’t exist” at all, then what is left? Literature, but in what is now its new avatar: sparkling everywhere, like an all-enfolding spiral of dust, and subject to a “dispersal in articulate shivers akin to instrumentation.”

Such a radical development could hardly be attributed to a few callow young poets trying out new voices. They were just one sign of a vast and silent upheaval, the first hint of the fact that an immediate correspondence between style and society was no longer possible now. Mallarmé tried to explain as much to his interviewer in the plainest, most straightforward terms: “Above all what has gone is the unquestionable notion that in a society with neither stability nor unity one cannot create a stable art, a definitive art.” Hence “the restlessness of minds”: hence “the unexplained need for individuality of which contemporary literary manifestations are the direct reflection.” A formidable sociologist when he chose to be, Mallarmé was far more interested in another order of events that was taking shape: the now evident incapacity of the community to create a style for itself would give style the chance — perhaps this is what it had always been waiting for — to free itself, to escape outside the society which hitherto had always exploited it for its own ends. Now in contrast a new and unknown land was opening up: the land of the “rhythmical knots,” a place where forms are freed from obedience to any authority and rest entirely on themselves.

The claims Mallarmé makes for prose, in his interview with Huret, are presented without demonstration, yet they carry immediate conviction. But can we demonstrate their truth? Let me try to approach the question with an example. In the Spleen de Paris Baudelaire has three prose pieces with the same title and subject matter as three of the poems in the Fleurs du mal. One of these is the famous “Invitation au voyage.” The poem is perfect, fused together like a Vermeer, every syllable pervaded by that “dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed,” that “every man has in him”—but with which Baudelaire had been more generously endowed than most. The poème en prose, written some time later, follows the poem step by step, but is much less effective and sometimes ponderous, at least for those who know the poem. But it’s hard to see why. Putting the two texts side by side, we find that many of the same images and tournures appear in both. Yet the prose piece has a flaw: it is at once lyrical and lavishly detailed. The lines of the poem, on the other hand, are sober and laconic. There are various points where it really would not be possible to offer a simpler version. Take, for example, the description of the furniture that would grace the place of happiness the piece evokes. The poem says: “Des meubles luisants, / Polis par les ans, / Décoreraient notre chambre.” The prose piece says: “Huge, odd, bizarre furniture bristling like subtle souls with locks and secrets. The mirrors, the metal fittings, the upholstery, the precious items and the majolica-ware play a mute and mysterious symphony for the eyes; and every single thing from every single corner, from the chinks in the drawers and the creases in the upholstery, gives off a special perfume, a Sumatran essence, that is as it were the soul of the apartment.” Here the accumulation of detail dilutes the effect. It’s hard to decide what to criticize most: whether the likening of the furniture to “subtle souls,” merely on account of the locks; or perhaps even worse, the idea of the various objects playing “a mute and mysterious symphony for the eyes”; or the punctiliousness with which we are told that a certain exotic perfume would be “the soul of the apartment,” where the word “apartment” with its cruel reminder of land registers and property laws deals the coup de grâce to any enchantment the piece might have had. The prose version is further flawed by a number of tactless remarks that aren’t there in the verse. In the first line of the poem the woman invited on the journey is evoked with a definitive “Mon enfant, ma soeur,” to which nothing need be added. In the prose, on the other hand, she is first referred to as “une vieille amie,” something that already sounds like a gaffe, while later on and with steadily increasing blandness she will become “mon cher ange,” then “la femme aimée,” and at last “la soeur d’élection” (where that élection is another detail we didn’t need). The use of the adjective profond is likewise a telltale sign: in the prose it turns up twice — which is already once too often, especially given the mention of the “profondeurs du ciel”—and what’s more, only three lines apart, first to refer to the sound of the clocks, then to some paintings that are to decorate the rooms of those absent: “Blessed, calm, and profound as the souls of the artists who created them.” The poem on the other hand speaks only of there being “miroirs profonds” in these rooms. And at once we are struck by how much more intense and mysterious those two words are than the cumbersome piling-up of adjectives the prose offers, aggravated, what’s more, by another appearance of the word âme, this time in the plural.

One could go on with the comparison, but already the evidence is damning. Still, we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking this is merely a question of prolixity versus concision, poeticizing — enemy of all literature — versus sobriety. Even less should we conclude that verse is intrinsically superior to prose: indeed it would be all too easy to find a reverse example of a redundant poem that ruins the sober dispatch of a note made in prose. The reason I offered this example has to do with Mallarmé’s theory as to the nonexistence of prose. If the lines of the “Invitation” are incomparably more attractive than the version in prose, it is first and foremost because the sovereign power of meter is so strongly at work in them, because the lines are held tight in the gentle pincers of meter and rhyme: two five-syllable lines with a masculine rhyme, followed by a seven-syllable line with feminine rhyme, where the sharpness of the masculine rhymes — like points of a triangle — are answered by the slight dip of the feminine rhymes. And this berceuse, rocking as gently boat of humeur vagabonde that you might see in some canal in Amsterdam, European storehouse of Oriental spice — this movement that is barely hinted at, yet perceptible with Flemish clarity, makes every single word its prisoner, so that they can’t expand even by a single syllable, they can’t launch into the explanation that kills, with what Verlaine called “la Pointe assassine.”

But what happens in the prose version? Does it really have, as Mallarmé’s argument suggests, a hidden and unnamed meter? And if it does, wouldn’t that contradict Baudelaire’s own claims, for in the dedication to Houssaye that opens the Spleen de Paris he presents the work as an example of “a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme”? “Without rhythm”: that sounds like a thesis that is the direct opposite of Mallarmé’s — as if prose were seeking to conquer the territory of poetry without bowing to the yoke of meter. But it’s well known that declarations of poetics all too often turn out to be traps lovingly set by writers for their readers. So it was that Gianfranco Contini’s analytical lancet would one day identify, in the very first paragraph of that remarkable declaration of intent, a weave of alexandrine hemistiches culminating, in the last sentence, in a pure alexandrine: “J’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.” And that’s not all. Extending his inquiry to the poèmes en prose themselves, Contini found numerous other alexandrine hemistiches, and most outstanding of all “a complete alexandrine, indeed one of the most extraordinary Baudelaire ever wrote: ‘au loin je ne sais quoi avec ses yeux de marbre.’” Or a slightly irregular alexandrine like: “Que les fins de journées d’automne sont pénétrantes.” And he eventually reaches the conclusion that the whole of the Spleen de Paris was “drenched in internal alexandrines.” But what happens when, as with “Invitation au voyage,” the prose is based on a model in verse that “has no relationship with the alexandrine”? We have already seen the semantic consequences, a tendency to amplify that dissolves the magic formula of the verse in a slow wave, whose charm is less intense, albeit still there. Now, Contini’s fine ear succeeded in pinning down the numerus of that wave: “So much sumptuousness allows of but one interpretation, which might concisely be described thus: the transformation of the Invitation’ into an equivalent of the poem in alexandrines.” As if Baudelaire had once again obeyed an obscure compulsion that drove him to say everything in alexandrines. Only in this meter would the lingua adamica articulate itself. So in the two versions of the “Invitation” the struggle is not between meter and prose “without rhythm,” as Baudelaire would have it, but between two different meters. And, for once, the alexandrine is beaten by the berceuse — something all the more remarkable when one considers that, as Contini put it, “Baudelaire speaks naturally in alexandrines or fragments of alexandrines, even where he tones them down and breaks them up.” The alexandrines within the Spleen de Paris thus confirm, in a sort of proof ab absurdo, the thesis put forward by Mallarmé.

But did Mallarmé merely want to tell us that meter was everywhere present in prose? Or was he trying to get at something at once more subtle and more serious? Let’s go back to the most surprising moments of the interview as reported by Huret: “To tell the truth, prose doesn’t exist: there is the alphabet and then there is verse, which may be more or less tight, more or less diffuse.” It’s hard at first to grasp the full — indeed, as we shall gradually appreciate, immense — consequences of these remarks. Like opium, as Baudelaire describes it, they have the power to “stretch out the unlimited.” The landscape that now opens up before us has two extremes: on the one hand, the alphabet; on the other, rhythm. And rhythm means meter. One’s immediate thought is that language, which until a moment ago was strutting center stage, has disappeared. Then we find it again, as a pure material that appears and continually migrates back and forth from one extreme to another. The relationships have changed: meter is no longer a mere function of language, but rather the contrary: language comes into being function of meter. It is only thanks to meter that we have style. And only thanks to style that we have literature. Consequently: any distinction between prose and poetry is insubstantial. They are just different degrees within the same continuum. Whether easy to recognize or not, rhythm is always the underlying power that governs the word, as if the literary depended most of all on a tension between this nonverbal, gestural, urgent element and the articulation of the word itself. What’s more, if “prose doesn’t exist,” one might equally well say that poetry doesn’t exist either. So what is left? Literature. Mallarmé had put this as clearly as it can be put: “The form called verse is simply itself literature.” But he also said that until Hugo’s death this truth had been hidden away like a divinity in a crypt, where “like a majestic, unconscious idea” it caused literature to weave a sort of secret dream around itself. Now that dream had burst out into the light. This was what Mallarmé was thinking of when he wrote that the end of the century had seen a “fretting of the veil in the temple, with significant folds and even some tearing.” The words were still ringing in Yeats’s ears when he entitled the first part of his Autobiographies “The Trembling of the Veil.” And ringing still louder the evening of the première of Ubu Roi, when he said to some friends: “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.”

Though it is with a certain incredulity, a century on, that one tries to imagine Puvis de Chavannes ever having had such a subversive power, all the same we can’t help hearing in Yeats’s words the striking, overheated chord of a new era. And especially when we see Mallarmé cited as the leading name in the list.

At this point it becomes increasingly clear how Mallarmé had seen and grasped, behind the claims of vers libre, a far more momentous event, one that manifested itself “for the first time in the literary history of any people”: the possibility, that is, for each individual, “with his own way of playing and his own individual ear, to fashion an instrument for himself, as soon as he blows, touches, or beats it with science.” In other words, an escape from the rhetorical canon, which was not to be rejected as such, only that it no longer had any power to bind and could no longer claim to be the voice of the community. At best the whole of rhetoric could now expect the same fate that awaited the alexandrine: as the “national cadence” it could be waved like a flag, at festivals and special celebrations. But to abandon the fortress of rhetoric did not, for Mallarmé, mean one need plunge into an amorphous maelstrom. On the contrary, what flashed before his vision was a literature where the power of form would be raised to an even higher level. True, form would be cut loose now from everything else, it would be more arduously encoded than it had been in the past; but perhaps precisely because of that it might also get closer to the underlying ground of our experience, since “There must be something occult in the ground of everyone.” This unprecedented literature opened out before him like a vast surface for possible combinations to form upon, a surface composed of letters and strewn with meters — whole, broken, obvious, disguised. So just when meter itself was being discredited as the voice of the community, the single meters, the single physiological feet of rhythm, became the hidden numerus and animating force of all literature, which was now entering a phase that would be “polymorphic” in the extreme. And yet nothing could have been more alien to Mallarmé than the cavalier gesturing of the avant-garde. Certainly the situation had forced upon everyone a “newly acquired liberty.” Yet something else needed saying too, and Mallarmé says it in a tone as calm as it is severe: “I cannot see, and this remains my firm opinion, that anything that was beautiful in the past is canceled out by this.” What did change radically was the strategic position of the word “literature.” On the one hand, it was rendered superfluous and ineffective by the flood of “universal reportage” that suffocated it; but at the same time, it was catapulted into a “new heaven and a new earth.” And this was at once the most disturbing news and the most difficult to grasp. Mallarmé places it at the center of his Oxford lecture. And he approaches it with maximum caution, solicitously advising his audience that it is surely an “exaggeration”:

“Yes, Literature exists and, if you like, alone, an exception from everything.”

More than any debate about free verse, this statement really was shocking. In his characteristic manner, “a bit like a priest, a bit like a ballerina,” and with his infinitely delicate and intimidating diction, Mallarmé gave notice that having left by society’s front door, literature was coming back in through a cosmic window, having absorbed in the meantime nothing less than everything. Those words marked the end of a long, meandering story. And they celebrated the moment when a daring fiction took shape and crystallized, a fiction from which the whole of the century to come would draw sustenance, and from which we still draw sustenance today: absolute literature.